Matthew Jones

DANCER Martin Sierra says the only thing worse than being a performing artist in his native Mexico is becoming a drug addict.
So it's not surprising that when Sierra told his parents he was swapping his diver's trunks for pointe shoes, they were not impressed.
The 34-year-old, who will present his first work in Australia as a choreographer tonight and tomorrow night, gave up the diving tower for the exercise bar in 1983 after a poolside accident.
"I broke both feet on the tower," he says. "I was doing a somersault and I left my feet on the tower. Then I became afraid.
"They gave us dance as part of our diving training and so I started to dance. As a diver you have strength, you have flexibility, you have many things a dancer needs."
Last year Sierra emigrated to Melbourne from Germany with his Australian-born dancer wife, Michelle Cassar. He lived and worked in Germany for a total of 11 years, in the East at the Komische Oper Berlin and in the West at the Saarlandishes Staatstheater.
Sierra says he was driven to create a work that expressed the cultural differences he felt on arriving in Australia. The resulting work, Inconspicuous, is a difficult project to categorise.
"I realised how slowly, inconspicuously - that's where the theme came from - culture starts to be part of you. You don't notice it."
Award-winning poet and scholar Irina Kuzminsky has written poetry for the piece as well as appearing as a dancer, and two of the dancers also play violin.
"Irina is bringing poems, I am bringing choreography, and the musicians who're playing the violin and dancing are bringing music and dance. It's an organised happening. Inconspicuously everything starts in an organic way to have a body."
Although Inconspicuous is an abstract work, it contains a number of stories, including one based on Picnic at Hanging Rock. "The girls were swallowed by the air, and I feel I've been swallowed here by this land."
Inconspicuous also benefits from the talents of former Australian Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theater dancer Alida Chase.
Chase, the former partner of famed avant-garde choreographer William Forsythe, is the only person in the country allowed to teach Forsythe's Improvisation Technology, and has been teaching this method to the performers.
Having had a great deal of success in Germany, Holland and Luxembourg, Sierra is keen to use Inconspicuous to show the Australian dance world what he can do.
"This piece is quite different to what is happening in Germany. I've put in dancers, musicians and theatre people and they have broken the boundaries by dancing all together. It's quite different to what people are used to."
He is also keen to create further opportunities for the kinds of talent that attracted him to emigrate in the first place.
"Australia has amazing dancers. But they come out from the VCA and they don't have a job. It's sad, so much talent wasted."